lution draws near. You review the past and pray, "God be merciful to me a sinner," You look forward to the future and pray, "Lord Jesus receive my spirit." But the dread of hearing the groans of your once promising child, when you are mingling your praises with the redeemed, overwhelms you with sorrow, and you depart in agonies. Is this a fictitious scene? No. It has been witnessed again and again, and there are many Parents, who are now weeping over the moral injury which their children have sustained at Boarding-Schools.* It is by no means the Author's wish to include all Boarding-Schools in the censure which this Paragraph conveys. He rejoices in the knowledge of many exceptions, which he is confident will increase in number and respectability, if the Religious Public be not wanting in their support. LETTERS TO PARENTS. LETTER II. On the Obligation of Parents to give Religious Instruction. A PERSON recognising the immense importance of religious instruction, if ignorant of the prevailing habits of the age, would naturally suppose that every house in this christianized country is a synagogue, every family an attentive audience, and every parent a diligent teacher. But let this stranger visit us, and he would retire with a firm persuasion that he had lighted on some deistical territory, rather than far-famed Britain. In some families he would see an altar erected to God, and the morning and evening sacrifice regularly presented, as in the Hebrew temple, but he might dwell with the great mojority, for six succeeding days, and if no formal questions were proposed, he would be unable to ascertain whether they were Jews or Atheists. Amongst them there is no prayer, no religious instruction. If he tarried with them over the Sabbath, he would perchance see them go out and return home, but if he were to listen to their conversation, he would not imagine that they had been to the house of devotion, unless he supposed, that like the ancient Jews, they had turned it into an house of merchandise. If this statement be correct, is it surprizing that the restless spirit of infidelity is pervading all classes, corrupting the morals of the rising generation, removing the land-marks of social order, destroying our reverence for the peculiar doctrines of the Scripture, and producing that state of degeneracy which is to precede the second coming of the Son of man? Instead of being astonished at its rapid and alarming progress, I rather wonder that, like the Assyrian conqueror, it has not laid the external fabric of Christianity in ruins, and led her adherents captives into its own cheerless dominions. That I am not with my Brethren, sitting beside some running stream, hearing the cruel taunt, "Conie |